Views on the News

Views on the News*

September 26, 2015

For millions of Americans, Barack Obama’s rise
to the Presidency was a redemption tale for an America that had lost its way in
the immediate post-9/11 years.Obama’s promise was to be a transformative figure,
his supporters averred. He would
reverse a suspiciously colonialist Bush-era foreign policy, deliver the country
into a post-racial period, and restore America’s faithin the power of collectivism and the
righteous efficacy of government. As the winter
of the Obama Presidency approaches, it seems beyond dispute that this Presidency
has robbed Americans of what remaining faith they had in the value of
collective action.The power of massive governmental
programs to effect positive change is, at best, dubious. The
tragedy of it all is that cynicism has replaced shock when the latest
scandalous revelations hit the newsstands.The expectation of corruption is a
condition that saps a nation’s faith in the virtue of self-governance. It is this kind of contempt for public
institutions that leads republics to ruin.Barack Obama’s administration isscandal-plagued.In its
twilight years, this White House has subordinated accountability and the
preservation of faith in public sector competence to exculpation from the political
press.The in-party spent the
better part of the three years that followed the deadly assault on diplomatic
and CIA compounds in Benghazi by framing the investigation into it as a
manifestation of Republicans’ pathological hatred for the President.The
Obama-era has made it difficult to recall that it was once the left that prided
itself for serving as sentinels standing guard against abuses by powerful
government agencies.Yet another simmering scandal involving
the misuse of the IRS has ensnared Democrats. Lerner, who has been accused of targeting
conservative political action committees with undue scrutiny, wrote. “We are witnessing the end of ‘America.’”Motive and opportunity having been
established, but we are told that there is nothing to see here. It is
the nonplused reaction from the public and the watchdog press to the
revelations involving the manipulation of intelligence related to the campaign
against the Islamic State that is the most disturbing. On August 25, a bombshell report in theNew York Timesindicated that the Pentagon IG’s office was
investigating credible claims that CENTCOM officials altered intelligence
reports related to ISIS. Those reports had been reviewed by ranking war planners,
including the president, and were designed to paint a rosier picture of the
state of the campaign than was warranted.In some cases, analysts were also
urged to state that killing particular ISIS leaders and key officials would
diminish the group and lead to its collapse. Many analysts, however,
didn’t believe that simply taking out top ISIS leaders would have an
enduring effect on overall operations.It is simply too coincidental that this
White House, which wanted nothing more than to avoid becoming embroiled in a
new conflict in the Middle East, was being fed intelligence that reinforced
their preferred preconceptions.It is the height of irresponsibility for
an informed citizenry to learn that the commander-in-chief was allegedly being
misled by his subordinates, putting American interests in jeopardy in the
process, and to simply brush it off as the cost of doing business.The
reprehensible revelations above are just a handful of the abuses of public
trust that have occurred over the last six years. Americans have grown complacent over the course of Barack
Obama’s presidency. A sense of disillusionment that would shrug off these
and other misuses of the public trust is unnerving and dangerous. For the
sake of the republican ideals, the voters and the press must get serious
about holding this White House to account.

For some years, below the surface, a quiet
counter-revolution has been advancing in the base of the Republican
Party and in the country in general, while the party’s establishment
elites in Washington have continued on with business as usual, seemingly
oblivious to the unrest of the rank and file, as if fly-over red state voters
could be taken for granted.This
counter-revolution was conceived and undertaken to change the trajectory of
America’s departure from its founding principles -- to bring reform to
the GOP rather than to overthrow the party. In short, the hope was
to reverse Republican establishment diffidence about out-of-control,
unaccountable government and its attendant crony corruption.Perhaps the best
way to understand and assess elites is by their choice of the players and the
“playbook” that guides them, which together determine what happens on the ground. The GOP lost the
last two Presidential elections largely because neither candidate had a winning
persona or campaign formula. The upstart, minimally qualified Democrat
candidate won by virtue of a superficial but alluring charisma and a superior
ground game. In addition to a very effective use of social media, that
ground game primarily consisted of unrelenting offensive tactics and strategy
taken out of Saul Alinsky’sRules for Radicals playbook: deception employing any means to discredit and keep the
opponent off balance.In response to election results tied to a failing Republican
establishment, in 2009 the Tea Party movement sprang up as a truly grassroots
collection of citizen activists.The early Tea Party had no central
hierarchy; its participants were motivated by a deep patriotic passion to
reverse the country’s precipitous decline as measured by such simple
indicators as trillion dollar deficits and unsustainable debt, stifling
regulation, and the overall lack of transparency and accountability throughout
government.Obama’s disrespect for the rule of law was revealed at the outset of
his administration in his unprecedented action that overturned longstanding
code and precedent of bankruptcy law. His bailout and
restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler stood the hierarchy of capital
claims on its head, arbitrarily destroying bondholder value while rewarding
unions and giving the federal government a majority ownership of GM. If changing existing law by executive fiat were not enough,
the next catalyst for Tea Party engagement was unprecedented political corruption
in the making of new law for which the Barack Obama took credit. The
Chicago way was on full display in maneuvering to pass the Affordable Care and
Patient Protection Act, better known as ACA or ObamaCare.
In addition to using blatant lies
and secrecy to pass the healthcare reform bill, Obama secured the votes of two
reluctant Democratic senators in Louisiana and Nebraska by offering their
states $300 billion and $100 billion respectively, in what was brazen federal
government bribery using taxpayers’ money. Meanwhile,
Tea Party leaders turned their eye on stopping ObamaCare
by preventing a Democrat filibuster with the special election of Scott Brown to
an open Senate seat following the death of Ted Kennedy, a seat safely held by
Democrats since 1953 in the blue stronghold of Massachusetts. Brown
was considered a moderate, but he stood firmly with Tea Party
positions, being committed to ending backroom deals behind closed doors,
simplifying and lowering taxes, eliminating wasteful government spending and,
most importantly, stopping Obama’s government-run healthcare
fiasco. In the end, Brown’s
successful election that shaved the Democrat vote to a maximum of 59,
denying them the ability to overcome a Republican filibuster, came to
naught as the Democrats out-maneuvered the Republicans by changing the
rules, turning the hugely expensive and disruptive healthcare bill into a
mere budgetary reconciliation vote, which required only a simple majority. The rise of the Tea Party may have
started from recognizing that Washington had become corrupt and tone-deaf to
the voices of the people. The greater catalyst for its rise was exasperation with the
Republican establishment’s failure as an opposition party, in particular
its inability to check a radical President and his subservient party.In the three elections since the Tea
Party came into being, Republicans promised that they would defund
or repeal ObamaCare, stem the flow of illegal
immigrants, reduce trillion-dollar deficits and debt, rein in regulatory
excess, and stand up to unlawful executive orders. Republicans failed to deliver on any of these promises.The fact remains that the GOP
appears weak in the face of a resolute, even dictatorial, President with the
present veto rate dramatically lower than that of any of the last ten Presidents.
The fecklessness of the GOP establishment has
clearly emboldened Obama and the Democrat Party.Within weeks of the November 2014
mid-term Republican landslide, President Obama announced his executive order
granting amnesty to some 5 million illegal aliens. As the new Congress took office in 2015 with newfound
Republican majorities in both houses, GOP leaders should have been able to
shake their legacy of being “the gang that couldn’t shoot
straight.”That didn’t
happen, as was shown in their handling of Obama’s unfolding nuclear deal
with Iran. Obama
outmaneuvered the Republicans once again by refusing to allow his negotiated
deal to be designated a treaty. Rather than fighting for and
standing firm for the Constitutional requirement of treaty status for
such an agreement, Republicans embraced the Corker bill, which ended up
turning the Constitution on its head, allowing Obama’s deal to go
through unless Congress could mount a 2/3 vote to overcome his inevitable
veto of their bill rejecting the Iran deal.The lesson here
is simple: the Constitution is the playbook for governing the U.S. and
when the GOP fails to uphold and fight for it they do so at their peril and
that of the nation.At a
time when America faced fewer challenges, a former GOP presidential candidate
once said that “moderation in the
protection of liberty is no virtue [and] extremism in the defense of freedom is
no vice.” Unusual times
require an unusual candidate that has a winning persona with the courage to
face and overcome hostility with the triumph of substance over form.

·Bully—use the thousands of newly
scripted, restrictive ordinances and regulations to pressure the majority to
conform to a moral standard that sullies their individual beliefs, and rights
to live by those beliefs.

·Tax—create and apply fines, fees
and licenses (revenue) against individuals refusing to accept or indulge the
new moral standard.

These are tactics that have long been used by invading forces
to subjugate populations. Islam is probably the best example of
application of these tools, witnessed by ISIS as it learned these ruling
principles from history. As Islam swept across Arabia, Africa and Spain in the seventh
century, the invaders: first labeled the indigenous people, who did not accept
or agree with Islam, asinfidels;
then Caliphates were established that instituted and enforced, by violence if
necessary, unbending sharia laws; Individuals
were compelled to renounce their faith and convert to Islam, professshahada;
and then the only allowances made for those who would not convert was
expulsion, execution or accede to second-class citizenship and pay a tax for
the privilege (jizya).All
invading armies used the same basic rulebook. Alexander the Great pressured the
native peoples to accept and adhere to Greek culture, the Greek tongue becoming
the lingua franca throughout the world almost to India’s borders.Rome used the same policy as they
applied the sword to each conquered tribe or nation. America is under
blatant attack by minority forces applying the well-worn theory of conquest and
submission, only this time it is a subtle culture shift brought about
incrementally.On top of the
culturally invasive groups that pressure the increasingly unstable governing
bodies, those same governing agencies now propose the resettlement of hundreds
of thousands that will further undermine America’s culture. The Syrian refugees, who have been
heavily infiltrated by people from other nations, will add to the millions of
illegal entrants already in our midst. The sheer numbers of all these groups
will induce a culture change by overwhelming the indigenous American culture,
whichcomprises colonization.The United
States of America was birthed as a haven for free expression of religion,
speech and livelihood, yet what has been engineered over the last century has
been the slow deterioration of that liberty.The last few decades has accelerated the
process byimporting millions of
individuals, legally and illegally, who have no interest in assimilating to the
culture of Freedom that is America. They have brought with them their fear of
different beliefs and a staunch adherence to rigid rules that are counter to
American freedom of thought. This nation was meant to be accepting of all faiths and
creeds but not at the expense of one group to the inflexibility of another.The nonjudgmentalism
of sexual orientation, the illegitimacy of racism, or the obduracy of Islam,
these doctrines are all pressuring and infringing on the religious expression
and pursuit of wealth by others. Using
the revised LGBT acronym, the fearful
(homosexual, reverse racist, Christian-phobic) apply mob action, rogue
judiciary and restrictive regulation to limit the rights of those who disagree,
minority harassment of the majority.A founding premise of this nation is that
each individual is a free operative, unfettered by oppressive law, taxation or
labeling; free to follow their faith without undue interference by minorities
forcing their opinion and lifestyles on others.Any immigrant
wishing to make their home in America must be willing to accept the native
culture of Freedom and they are to be held to that standard to gain entrance.

Cities in the U.S. are going bankrupt, but it is not
the private sector of the cities that is causing the bankruptcy but the public
sector, specifically public union spending. These cities spent so much money on public salaries
and pensions that they couldn’t tax the people enough, so they began to
borrow money; then they began to borrow money again to make the payments on the
money they had first borrowed.In the
private sector this kind of Ponzi scheme is a crime, but
since government does it, and they won’t jail each other, they get away
with it.No public sector
union has yet shut down. They always find ways toengineer financesso the public is stuck with the
bill. Unions get all the benefits and force
taxpayers to take all the risks.In all cases so far the cities doing
this, the public unions, are all run by Democrats.Public pensions
are out of control. Los Angeles, CA hasfour
retired Fire Department officialswho earn over $800,000 a year in
their pension. There’s dozens more who earn from $300,000 and more.The core issue
is whether city governments can act independently of the electorate and engage
in binding contracts with public unions without the consent of the taxpayers.
They have managed to create and maintain a distance between their fiscal
decisions and the will of the people.The city bankruptcy rulings of Stockton, CA and Detroit, MI give some
clues as to the constitutional context of this public debt.Federal
bankruptcy law is written to address only in the private sector debt.City bankruptcies are created by
public sector unions. This model of debt is different. No longer is Person A
indebted to Person B for their own debts, but a new Person, Person C, the
taxpayer, is on the hook to pay for the pension debts created by Person
A. Often these debts were secretly created so many
communities do not know how much pension debt they have. This debt
has been created for them without their permission and is hidden from public
knowledge. It remains to be seen
whether an individual taxpayer can sue a city government for this debt.Two major cities have recently gone
through Federal bankruptcy proceedings: Stockton, CA and Detroit, MI. By Federal law
the state must authorize the local city to file for bankruptcy. This
in itself is questionable because if a state is totally run by one political
party, as the states containing these bankrupt cities are, then there is a
built-in obstacle to filing for bankruptcy and mandating financial
solvency. In bothStocktonand Detroit, Federal judges ruled in
favor of theft of money from muni bond investors
and keeping the public pension system mostly intact. Only
government officials were represented, and they fought to maintain this
three-party arrangement. This three-party
contract may be unconstitutional for several reasons. One, when judges rule to maintain the public sector contracts and
force Federal bailouts of the cities, they are legislating taxes on all Americans
andArticle 1 Section 7of the Constitution
clearly states “All bills for raising revenues shall originate in the
House.” Federal judges have no authority to issue
rulings that raise revenues on all Americans. Secondly, these three party contracts are taxation without
representation. The only way the taxpayers could have a say is for
the entire contract and its terms to be placed on ballots, but they were
not. Third, cities force taxpayers to pay
property taxes based on the threat of selling their home for back taxes.
The 5th Amendment clearly states that government may not take property for
public use without just compensation. Fourth, there
is nothing in contract law that legalizes three-party contracts. This
type of contract is restricted to government. Illinois and Michigan both
state that public contracts cannot be “diminished
or impaired” yet this standard does not apply to private
contracts. These states may be violating the equal protection clause of
the 14th Amendment and this issue should be address by SCOTUS. It is only by
dodging these two types of constraintsthat
cities are able to create these huge debts, abuse the rights of the taxpayers,
and run their communities into bankruptcy and economic ruin.

Modern capitalism is under attack, with some preferring our
economic system be called “technological
and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange
among all the parties involved,” or perhaps “fantastically
successful liberalism, in the old European sense, applied to trade and
politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting and
literature,” or simply “trade-tested progress.”Many humans, in short, are now stunningly better
off than their ancestors were in 1800. In the two centuries after
1800 the trade-tested goods and services available to the average person rose
by a factor of 30 or 100.The “Great Enrichment” of the past two centuries has dwarfed
any of the previous and temporary enrichments. Explaining it is the central scientific
task of economics and economic history, and it matters for any other sort of
social science or recent history.The causes were not (to pick from the apparently
inexhaustible list of materialist factors promoted by this or that economist or
economic historian) coal, thrift, transport, high male wages, low female and
child wages, surplus value, human capital, geography, railways, institutions,
infrastructure, nationalism, the quickening of commerce, the late medieval
run-up, Renaissance individualism, the First Divergence, the Black Death,
American silver, the accumulation of capital, piracy, empire, eugenic
improvement, the mathematization of celestial
mechanics, technical education, or a perfection of property rights.Routines cannot account for the strangest
secular event in human history, which began with bourgeois dignity in Holland
after 1600, gathered up its tools for betterment in England after 1700, and
burst on northwestern Europe and then the world after 1800. The modern world was made by a slow-motion revolution
in ethical convictions about virtues and vices, in particular by a much higher
level than in earlier times of toleration for trade-tested progress, letting
people make mutually advantageous deals, and even admiring them for doing so,
and especially admiring them when Steve-Jobs like they imagine betterments.The Bourgeois Revaluation, was the coming of a business-respecting
civilization, an acceptance of the Bourgeois Deal: “Let me make money
in the first act, and by the third act I will make you all rich.”Much
of the elite, and then also much of the non-elite of northwestern Europe and
its offshoots, came to accept or even admire the values of trade and
betterment. Or at the least the
polity did not attempt to block such values, as it had done energetically in
earlier times. They undertook to respect, or at
least not to utterly despise and overtax and stupidly regulate, the
bourgeoisie.The reason for the Bourgeois Revaluation was the surprising, black-swan luck of
northwestern Europe’s reaction to the turmoil of the early modern, the
coincidence in northwestern Europe of successful Reading, Reformation, Revolt,
and Revolution: “the Four Rs.”The dice were rolled by Gutenberg,
Luther, Willem van Oranje, and Oliver Cromwell. By a lucky chance for England their
payoffs were deposited in that formerly inconsequential nation in a pile late
in the seventeenth century. None of
the Four Rs had deep English or European causes. A result of
Reading, Reformation, Revolt, and Revolution was a fifth R, a crucial
Revaluation of the bourgeoisie, first in Holland and then in Britain. The Revaluation was part of an R-caused,
egalitarian reappraisal of ordinary people. The Industrial Revolution and especially the Great Enrichment
came from liberating commoners from compelled service to a hereditary elite, such as the noble lord in the castle, or compelled
obedience to a state functionary, such as the economic planner in the city hall,
and it came from according honor to the formerly despisedcommoners
exercising their liberty to relocate a factory or invent airbrakes.

Two notorious wars of words are active in today’s culture; the American “Black
Lives Matter” (aka BLM) complaint domestically and the quarrels
at home and abroad about terror, violence, and Islamic culture.Black
America and Islam are united by grievance, the perception, in both cases, that
the plaintiffs are victims; preyed upon or handicapped by race, religion,
politics, oppression, bigotry,history,
or all of the above.In both
cases, general and sweeping indictments of “majority”
cultures are used to justify a litany of social pathologies that run the
spectrum from poverty, illiteracy, addiction, crime, on to terrorism. Violence is the
mastic that joins both Islamist and black American cultures.Ironically,
in both African America and Muslim countries, most of the crime, terror, and
related bloodletting is self-destructive; black on
black crime at home and internecine Muslim mayhem in Arabia and the widerUmmah.In America, black lives don’t matter to African
Americans any more than Muslim lives matter to Islamists abroad. Perceptions of “oppression” by African Americans, as with
Islamists, are self-inflicted wounds. Police violence is a statistical footnote
in the gross context of pathological social mayhem,If black menbehavedbetter in America there would be no
need for a disproportionate police presence, no need for confrontations in
black communities.If
Muslims behaved better globally, there would be no need for coalitions, “humanitarian” interventions, or air strikes
anywhere. Violence begets violence.Statistical evidence for social or behavioral
deficits in black America is overwhelming. Pathologies include semi-literacy,
crime, welfare dependencies, substance abuse, obesity, out-of-wedlock
pregnancy, single parent homes, abuse of women, and abortion just to name some
of the more obvious problems. In
America, 325,000 black men and women have beenkilledby other blacks in the past 35 years. A black woman in America is five times as
likely to have anabortionas a white woman. Seventeen million black babies have been
aborted since 1973. Death by “choice” in black America is
almost twice the death rate from all other causes.Killing minorities in the womb,
or at birth, in the name of women’s rights is a little like endorsing
ISIS and ethnic cleansing in the name of human rights. The body partsbazaarat Planned Parenthood is another
symptom of mission creep at the temple of good intentions. Nobody wants to know how many black
organs are pedaled by Planned Parenthood today.There is at
least one American exemplar where politics, religion, and social pathology
intersect in significant ways.The Nation of Islam (NOI) in America is a
strange bird even in a global aviary of diverse Islamic militants, cults, and sects.NOI combines
Black Nationalism with exclusionary Islamist theology.Indeed, the Black Muslim movement
argues for the resegregation of the races in much the
same way that Shia and Sunni Islamists call for
Islamic religiousmonoculture.Inclusion and tolerance is not the
strong suite of the NOI or any of the larger Islamist movements.NOI complaints just echo the special
pleading and distortions that characterize race arguments in the United States.Crime weary
Americans fear or distrust an angry black minority for the same reason it fears
barbarous Muslim terror and bombs.Behavior and bigotry are different
things. When violent behavior validates a culture, the fault is not in bias since
all behaviors inform all beliefs.Too
many Mohammedans, now on a global scale, use terror, bombs, or worse to
leverage real or imagined grievance. Nonetheless, Europeans and Americans take
great pains to minimize atrocities committed in the name of God, a prophet, and
“sacred” books.The so-called
“Islamophobia” phenomenon, like
perceptions of racism, is a self-inflicted wound. Five memes dominate street
credibility in the US: Islam, hip-hop/rap, college/professional athletics,
criminals, and ex-cons. One in
three black male Americans is likely to have a prison record, a principal
reason that explains theshortageof African-American cops. American prisons now double down as a
primary recruiting venue for cults like the Nation of Islam.Positive black role models, including
Martin Luther King, are often marginalized in black America as “Uncle Toms” or “Aunt Jemimas.” Success stories like Ben Carson, Clarence
Thomas, Janis E. Brown, Thomas Sowell, Allen West, Star Parker, or Walter
Williams are seldom held up as role models for black children.Instead, the media celebrates rappers,
athletes, entitlement/reparation shills, and media mimbo/bimbos
like “Whoopie” Goldberg, Jesse Jackson, Jerimiah Wright, Al Sharpton, and
Donna Brazile. Black Americans felons too are
oftencelebratedas yet another class of victims, not
convicted punks. Fortunately, the victim narrative and
the excuse litanies are, at last, showing signs ofwear.Black intellectuals and some
prominent blackpolice chiefshave come forward to change the
conversation, arguing that Black culture and behavior, not racism or police
persecution, is at the heart of African American darkness.Deenen Borelli, author
ofBlacklash, lays the blame for the new American “plantation,”
black pathology and dependency, on failed government social policy and failed
politicians like Barack Obama.Ben
Carson has the potential to repair the damage done by Barack Obama. He candidly expressed the opinion that a
Muslim “shouldn’t” be
President of the United States. Carson thus became the first candidate from either party to
underline the incompatibility of American and Muslim values. Ben Carson may be the
diagnostician that provides a new prognosis for race relations -- a new cure
where success and civility eradicates the social melanomas of black dependency
and white resentment. Political candor and healing, call it a “blacklash” of civility and common sense, seems to be
just what the doctor ordered for America.

There is so much
published each week that unless you search for it, you will miss important
breaking news.I try to package the
best of this information into my “Views on the News” each Saturday
morning.Updates have been made
this week to the following sections: